42 12

A Critical Discussion on Bath-tub Curve

Tan Cheng
Institute served: China Association for Technical Supervision Information (CATSI)
E-mail: honesty108@hotmail.com
Abstract
The typical bathtub curve and its standardshape have been widely accepted as an
engineering tool in reliability management and training. However, some recent researches
reveal that the typical theory of
bathtub curveis not so convincing in some situations.
Therefore, a critical discussion is developed to research the bath-tub curve along three
significant periods of bath-tub; i.e. infant mortality, useful life and wear-out. The discussion
is not only focused on the performance at different period but trying to reveal some
in-depth theoretical considerations and practical contradictions behind every specific
distorted
bath-tub. At last it concludes that the true meaning of bath-tub curve is on the
business practice of the real world rather than any simplified models.

Keywords: bath-tub curve, infant mortality, useful life, wear-out.

 42 12

1. Introduction

Fa
i
l
ur
e
,f
ormos
tpa
r
t
sofa
nope
r
a
t
i
on,i
saf
unc
t
i
onoft
i
me
(
Sl
a
c
k,2001)
.I
n
many cases, plotting the failure rate against a continuous time scale, the results will
constitute the so-c
a
l
l
e
d
ba
t
h-t
ubc
ur
ve(
see Figure 1). From its shape, the curve can
be divided into three distinct zones or periods quite readily. These zones differ from
each other in failure rate and in causation pattern as follows: infant mortality, useful
life, and wear-out. However, some recent researches reveal that the typical theory of

ba
t
ht
ubc
ur
ve
i
snots
oc
onvi
nc
i
ngi
ns
omes
i
t
ua
t
i
ons
.Thepur
pos
eoft
hi
spa
pe
ri
st
o
identify and critically discuss the practical methods to quantify and eliminate failure in
e
a
c
hpa
r
tof
ba
t
ht
ubc
ur
ve
bya
ppr
e
c
i
a
t
i
ngt
hewa
yt
hef
a
i
l
ur
er
a
t
ebe
ha
vei
nt
i
me
.
Further, to show how to combine these methods in a coherent quality & reliability
programme plan to reduce the initial-failure rate, extend the useful life, limit the
random failure rate and take necessary action before wear-out period.

Random
failure
Wearout
failure
Early
failure

Figure 1

Figure 2

2. The Typical Theory of Bath-tub Curve

The typical theory of
bathtub curvehas been widely accepted as an engineering tool.
The bathtub shape is
c
ha
r
a
c
t
e
r
i
s
t
i
cof the failure rate curve of many well designed
products and components including the human body
(Oakland, 1992). The classic
bathtub curve against time has three different periods: Decreasing failure rate for infant
mortality; Constant failure rate for useful life; and increasing failure rate (without
bound) for wear-out. Ebeling (1997) expresses this notion of bathtub curve as a
composite of several failure distributions, and formulises it as
a function of piecewise
linear and constant failure rates
.
Cater (1986) however, argues this typical mode is only suitable for complex
maintained components, which shows an additional constant failure rate for truly
random failure, while for simple non-maintained components there is no such an
additional constant failure rate. So there is a necessity to have a critical review on the
three periods of the bathtub curve.

 42 12

3. The infant mortality period

3.1 Identify and quantify failures in infant mortality
From the Figure 2, it can be seen that the initial
infant mortalityperiod of bathtub
curve is characterized by high failure rate and the items become less likely to fail as
their survival time increases. For long time product, as what Juran (1988) has pointed
that the
infant mortalityis a major reason determining complaints rate. On the other
hand, although the initial failure period is generally short, there are some exceptions.

This period normally ranges from a few minutes to several hundreds hours
. So to
provide customer good product reliability, it is necessary to reduce initial failure rate.
Generally different people have slight differences in the expression of the causations of
initial failures. Ebeling (1997) suggests that poor quality control is one of major
causations of early failures. The poor material is recognized by the
Reliability
Guidebook of Japanese Standards Associationas a major reason of failures in the
infant mortality period. From Juran
s (1988) view most of the failures during infant
mortality period are results of identifiable causes, such as blunders in design,
manufacture, or usage or of misapplication. This reflects Juran
s quality philosophy,
which is based on the presumption that the use of product can be fully understood.
That
s an important contradiction with Deming
s quality thinking, who believes that
the information sometimes is not only unknown, but inherently unknowable to us; and
sometimes failures may be caused by
Acts of God
. Interestingly, even Juran (1988)
himself also admits that although reliability is determined by the quality of design, the
achieved reliability is usually less than the attainable or intrinsic reliability because of

the unanticipated environment during use, laps in quality of conformance,

inadequacies in maintenance, etc
.
Based on Juran
s (1988) proposal, the quantification process of reliability involves four
phases: establishment of objective, apportionment, prediction and analysis.
Establishing the requirements here implies determine an ultimate acceptable
failure rate before the product population leave the factory. This phase requires
designers to understand the design in greater depth to define environment conditions
and successful product performance precisely, especially process wording reliability
requirements concerns to product specification. Moreover, Juran (1988) reminds the
further critical wording of what constitutes a failure and the exceptions to the failure
definition, which
can readily be decisive as to whether the product meets the test
.
Obviously, the failure definition is critical to the provisions of warranty for customers.
Apportionment or budgeting implies allocating the overall numerical
reliability objective for each portion of the design, which makes up the total product
3

 42 12

collectively. Additional, in this process engineering judgement with knowledge and

previous experiences should be combined.

Inherent in the establishment of reliability requirements is the need to estimate
or predict reliability in advance of manufacturing the product(Juran, 1988). The
prediction should be based on design information and past failure rate experience. In
the final stage, as Juran (1988) has pointed, the prediction becomes
the measurement
based on data from field use of the product
. Through the prediction, a quantitative
evaluation of the early failure rate can be achieved; the potential area for reliability
improvement can also be identified. In addition, this phase can be effective by using
some software. However, the people who process prediction must state the assumption
behind their predictions, and further to provide
a good quantitative measure of the
uncertainties in the number(Editorials of IEEE transaction on reliability, 1999).
Analysis phase here means to identify the strong and weak points for
improvement, trade-off and some other actions. Some analysis techniques, such as
FTA, FMECA, a
nd
wor
s
t
-case analysiscan be adopted during this phase.
3.2 Eliminate failures in infant mortality
Ebeling (1997) suggests four methods to reduce failures during infant mortality period,
they are: Burn-in testing or debugging testing, Environment Stress Screening, Quality
control and Acceptance testing. In addition, Juran (1988) adds in accelerated testing as
a way to identify and eliminate initial failures.
3.2.1 Burn-in or debugging testing
Due to the high failure rate in the initial failure period, burn-in (for electronic items) or
debugging are widely accepted as an approach to screening out failures before they
leave the factory until the product population reaches a low failure-rate. The failed
products are scrapped (if not repairable) or minimally repaired (if repairable).
The application of debug or burn-in is to keep the weak unit failure takes place in the
test period rather than in service. However, Kuo (1984) argues that the traditional
decision criteria used to burn-in components is simple and arbitrary. These kinds of
models cannot sufficiently reflect the real world. The editorial of IEEE (1999)
comments that these simpleminded conceptual and ideal models
bring mind some
desired utopian state, not the rough-and-ready quick-and-dirty simple-mindedness of
our equation
. It is ivory tower, not engineer
s tool. Further, Juran (1988) also warns
some risks of testing, such as intended use differs from actual use; model construction
is not flexible enough for subsequent production, the small number of models building
is not adequate for mass production; and subjective evaluation of test results because
of pressures to release a design for products. So the deeper studies of the actual
4

 42 12

conditions of use and engineering knowledge should be involved into design.

Another major problem associated with burn-in is to decide exactly how long and at
what level of assembly should the components be burned in, trading off appropriately
the need of reliability and the total cost. The insufficient burn-in may result in high
initial failure rates, which may increase high field repair costs. On the other hand, with
excessive burn-in, the decreased failure rate may cause increased cost and recurring
costs. However, in some situations, burn-in or debugging may be not needed at all,
such as for some inexpensive components, where
repair is simple and the
consequences of failures are trivial(Kuo, 1984). But the debugging or burn-in will be
paid eventually, directly or indirectly by the customers. The customer will trade off the
costs of burn-in against the costs of receiving unreliable products. So there are three
ways to balance this problem: (1) to minimize the cost of customer and (2) to
maximize the benefits of testing (3) to trade off the cost and benefits of burn-in testing.
Plesser and Field (1977) considered that the optimising debugging or burn-in time
could minimize the cost of ownership. Chengstudies also support this opinion. He
determines the optimal burn-in time by minimizing the system cost, for example to
reduce costly early field replacements.
Cozzolino (1966), on the other hand, adopted a test policy
for determining the
sequence of decisions that would maximize the excepted benefits of testing for initial
defects(Ascher, 1984). Chandrasekaran has similar consideration. He recognizes the
problems of minimizing life-cycle cost and determines the optimal burn-in time so as
to maximize
mean residual life(MRL) and to realize the total cost optimisations.
With respect to this point, Park (1985) reminds that although it is popular believed that
with the increase of burn-in period, the failure rate of product surviving the burn-in
tends to decrease until reach the useful life period where failure rate is constant, yet
this popular belief is questionable. He chooses the
mean residual life(MRL) as a
parameter to study the effects of burn-in and concludes that in the post-burn-in period,
the
time at which a bathtub failure rate is minimum does not maximize the MRL
(Park, 1985), and the MRL in the constant failure-rate region of a bathtub curve is not
constant too.
Marko and Shoe
ma
ke
r

sresearch of optimal burn-in solution is based on the definition

of life-cycle cost. They regard the life-cycle cost as a combination of burn-in cost and
field failure cost. Different from the two methods mentioned above, they use

exhaustive search techniques to optimise space module burn-in and thereby minimize
a part of the life-cycle cost(Kuo, 1984). The optimal solution is then identified by
comparing the increased costs associated with added burn-in against field saving from
failure reductions.
However, this notion of trade-off between quality and cost is not accepted by all the
5

 42 12

quality gurus. Juran believes COQ can also be used to establish the goal of quality
pr
ogr
a
ms
:
t
oke
e
pi
mpr
ovi
ngqua
l
i
t
yunt
i
lt
he
r
ea
r
enol
onge
rpos
i
t
i
vee
c
onomi
c
r
e
t
ur
n
.Thi
sa
na
l
y
s
i
si
sbui
l
tont
hea
s
s
umpt
i
ont
h
a
ta
sde
f
e
c
t
sbe
c
omef
e
we
ra
ndf
e
we
r
or reduced to lower or lower level, the cost of prevention and appraisal cost will
approach to infinity. Then, the minimized cost of quality can be achieved at the point
where additional spending on prevention and appraisal equals to the savings resulted
from these preventive and appraise activities in failure cost. On the contrary, Deming
believes that that lower cost can be achieved through improved quality. As what Slack
(2001) has pointed Deming
s basic philosophy is that quality and productivity can
increase simultaneously by decreasing the
process variability
. He called in question
that the traditional view of the existed trade-off between quality and productivity. He
thinks costs and quality are not to be trade off against each other. The reduced rework,
fewer delays, better utilization of resources, lower cost, happier people on the job,
more jobs and hence improved market share and long term business survival can be
achieved from the improved quality.
3.2.2 Environment Stress Screening
Both Juran (1988) and Ebeling (1997) think
Environment stress screeningshould be
used to eliminate the early failures due to weak parts, workmanship defects. Juran
(1988) define it as tests performed at lower level of the product. Further, he also
suggests combine it with life testing to identify weak points in new designs. Moreover,
Yan (1997) also suggests the implementation of
Environmental stress screeningin
eliminating patent failures during useful life period, which will be discussed later in
Clause 4.4.
3.2.3 Quality control
Quality control is concerned with identifying and controlling product and service
characteristics and further to prevent the occurrence of failures. For example, process
control chart can be used to detect potential problems when a process was going out of
control and then take corresponding actions before the occurrence of failure.
3.2.4 Product reliability acceptance test
From Juran
s (1988) point, acceptance tests can be used as
periodic evaluations of
reliability of production hardware
, especially when design, tooling, processes, parts,
or other characteristics have some changes.
3.2.5 Accelerated testing
Accelerated testing is
a common form of securing reliability test data at reduced
testing cost(Juran, 1988). In accelerate testing products will burden abnormally high
6

 42 12

level of stress and / or environment to make them fail sooner. The short life under
severe conditions then can be transferred into normal conditions by extrapolation.
However, the shortcomings of accelerated testing are obvious. Firstly, in practice the
time of accelerated testing is hard to be controlled to ensure it is properly correlated to
normal use time and avoiding overstating the expected life. Secondly, accelerated
testing may introduce some new failure modes, which do not occur under normal
conditions. Further, these new failure modes may result in costly redesign,
whi
c
h
provide no benefit from the standpoint of the original product requirements(Juran,
1988). Generally, although the misled risks of accelerated testing do exist, the benefits
from testing can be substantial. So Juran (1988) suggested that the involvement of
engineering judgement in such tests is crucial.
4. The constant failure rate period
4.1 General explanation of
useful lifeperiod
The infant mortality period is followed by a nearly constant failure rate period known
as
useful life
. In this region failures occur by purely chance. Additional, as the failure
rate is constant, this is the only region, in which the exponential distribution can be
valid and thereby the time between failures is exponentially distributed.
4.2 Identify and quantify failures in useful-life
Juran (1988) thinks that the failure of this period result from the inherent limitation of
design and accidents caused by usage or poor maintenance. Additional, Ebelin (1997)
adds the environment random load and
Acts of Godinto causations.
On the other hand, as the failure rate during this period is constant, the failure rate
follows exponential distribution (or Weibull distribution with the shape parameter of

1 ). The mechanism of exponential distribution, as Juran (1988) has pointed, is that

of random failures which are independent of accumulated life and consequently are
individually unpredictable. This mechanism is important for the calculation system
reliability, which is often assumed that the
system reliability is the product of the
individual reliability of the n parts within the system(Juran, 1988). That is so-called

product rule
:
Ps P1 P2 ...Pn

(1)

As the
product rulealso assumes (1) the failures of any parts will cause system failure,
and (2) reliability of the parts are independent of each other, so when each parts
follows exponential distribution, then:

 42 12

Ps e t11 e t22 ...e tn n

(2)

Further, if t is the same for each part:

t
Ps e

(3)

Therefore, when the failure rate is constant, the system reliability can be predicted by
addition of the part failure rate. Although the assumption is not always valid and the
assumption of exponential distribution should be supported by data collection of
failures, yet because of the simplicity of the exponential density function, it has been
used extensively in reliability work.
But Jensen (1990) argues that in the bathtub pattern, the constant (or nearly constant)
failure rate is found in strictly life-tests. During these tests the random fluctuation does
not take place. Juran (1988) also admits that the assumption of constant failure rate is
rightly questioned. But the
experience suggests that this assumption is often a fair to
make(Juran, 1988). Further he believes that taking design actions to produce a
constant failure rate is more fundamental than arguing the validation of assumption.
4.3 Eliminate failures in
useful life
From Juran
s (1988) view, good control on operation and maintenance procedures can
be applied to eliminate the accident failures during useful life period, which are caused
by poor maintenance or usage. However, the basic reduction of failure rate requires a
basic redesign. Differently, Ebeling (1997) suggests using redundancy to reduce
failures during
useful life
. Ascher (1984) argues that these kinds of contradictions
may result from the ignorance and misunderstanding of the existence of
two bathtub
curve
, one is
a model for a population of parts, and another bathtub curve with a
different interpretation is a model for a system
In addition, it is worthy of attention that the decrease in failure rate during
useful life
period (or increase in MTBF for repairable component) does not result in a
proportional increase in reliability (the probability of survival). For example, in
equation R e t , if t = 1h. A fivefold increase in MTBF from 20 to 100h can only
produce 4% increase in reliability. But by increasing MTBF from 5 to 10h, 8%
increase can be gotten in reliability. The understanding of this exponential character is
important, because the failure rate or MTBF are always used as criteria for
decision-making, which will affect reliability, whereas
the probability of survival for a
specified time t may be the more important index to the customer(Juran, 1988)
4.4 Some specific bathtub curve
Different types of component can exhibit significant variations on this basic bathtub
8

 42 12

shape. Some of the differences represent in useful life period. Billington

s (1992)
believes that two particular examples cover the two extreme cases, they are: electronic
component and mechanical component. Comparing to mechanical components,
electronic components (See Figure 2) are usually associated with a relative long useful
life, while for mechanical components (See Figure 3), this period is very brief.
Moreover, Slack (2001) also points that for the failures of operation which rely more
on human resources than on technology, the useful life of bathtub curve is not evident
and the initial failure period may be followed by a long period of increasing failure.
(See Figure 4)

Figure 3

Figure 4

Moreover, some recent research in the electronic industry has identified another failure
pattern: latent failure. The causations of latent failure is the undetected failures, which

can not be readily defected by inspection or functional testing until it is transferred

into a patent defect by environmental stress applied over time(Yan, 1997). The
characteristic of latent failure is when the stresses, both from internal and external,
exceed the strength of system; there will be a jump in the failure-rate curve because of
the occurrence of latent failure. (See Figure 5)

Failure rate

A Bathtub Curve with Latent-failure Model

20
10
0
0

10

15

20

Time

FFigure 5
Further, Yan (1997) also argues that in conventional bathtub curve, the failure time is
assumed to be continuous between zero and infinity. However, in practice, the useful
life of most electronic system is finite. The technology obsolescence factor should be
considered. Therefore, the combination of technical obsolescence and latent defects
can be
mode
l
l
e
das a truncated mixture distribution(Yan, 1997). (See Figure 6)
However, as Yan (1997) has pointed, although the actual shape of bathtub curve can be
various, the general shape remains the s
a
me

 42 12

Failure rate

A Truncated-Bathtub for a Mixture Distribution

20
15
10
5
0
0

10

15

20

Time

Figure 6
5. The wear-out period
5.1 General explanation of wear-out period
The wear-out period is characterized by a rapid increasing failure rate with time. From
Billington
s (1992) point of view, this period is more evident than the other two
periods as in this region, the failure density function will increase firstly, and then
decrease to zero for the obsolescence of components.
5.2 Identify and quantify failures wear-out period
In the wear-out period, the failure density function can often be represented or
approximated by normal distribution. The gamma and Weibull distribution are also can
be used to quantify failures during wear-out period. The reason is these distributions
have shaping parameters,
the variation of which can create significantly different
characteristic shape(Billington, 1992). Further, Billington
s (1992) points that if the
wear-out region is normal distributed
the time at which it enters the wear-out region
depends upon the standard deviation of the distribution.
However, Billington (1992) also reminds that the reliability prediction based on
useful
lifefailure rate is invalid and extremely optimistic to be used with wear-out period. On
the other hand, although the
useful lifefailure rate is analytical simple and the
useful
life period can be extended by careful and regular preventive maintenance and
replacement
, In practice, the component may fail long before the MTBF or MTTF is
reached owing to the wear-out.
5.3 Eliminate failures in wear-out period
Juran (1988) suggests that the failures during wear-out period are due to old age. From
his view, to reduce the failures it is necessary to bring preventive replacement of the
dying components into effects. Ebeling (1997) agrees with that and adds preventive
maintenance as another method to reduce failures during wear-out period. Cater
10

 42 12

(1986) further comments that for mechanical system with ideal maintenance, (that is
all failed components will be replaced by identical components without disturbing the
system) the failure rate of system can remain the steady state and then the wear-out
section of the bathtub curve could be eliminated. But Cater (1986) also admits that in
practice this
ideal maintenancedoes not practicable. On the contrary, effective
wear-out can prevent the unnecessary outmoded or uneconomical repair of mechanical
equipment.
5.4 Arguments about the wear-out periods
Although the wear-out period of the bathtub curve is widely accepted, some
researchers yet call into question of the shape and existence of the wear-out section of
the bathtub curve.
George (2000) argues that the nonparametric estimates of failure rate function can
reveal some unexpected thing, which is
the bathtub curve doesn
t always hold water
(Figure 7). He reminds the attention to retirement and points that retirement, which
here means
fewer operating hours per calendar time unit(George, 2000) can also
causes the decrease of failure rate. The
bathtubdoesn
t hold water when the
retirement occurred earlier than wear-out.

Figure 7

Figure 8

Similarly, Ascher (1984) also argues that although the bathtub curve theory represents
the view of many reliability engineers and it is a better mode for some system, the
repairable system bathtub curve contradicts the limitation theorems. The limitation
theorem, which is illustrated in the Figure 8, indicates that the system will settle down
to a constant value in the long life region, just where the bathtub curve forecasts that
the failure rate will increase sharply. Further, as Ascher (1984) has pointed the
reconciliation between bathtub curve and limit theorems will show a curve would show
an inconspicuous wear-out period. In addition, Tsang (1995) declares that an extensive
study in the airline industry proves that the bathtub curve is not a universal mode that
applies to all items, and
as much as 89 percent of all the airline equipment items do
not have a noticeable wear-out region throughout their service life(Tsang, 1995).
6. Conclusion
The bathtub curve is a common model to describe the failure rate of a population and
11

 42 12

has been widely accepted as an engineer tool. However, as discussed above in some
situations the typical bathtub theory is not so convincible. As what Warrington (2001)
has suggested that the simplicity of definition is its downfall. So it
s really necessary to
combine the methods, which is used to identify and eliminate failures together and
implement them as a coherent quality and reliability programme aiming at actual
required function, stated conditions and specific period, associated with consideration
of costs, requirements of customer, design, business and manufacturing practice as
well.
Acknowledgement
ALL FOR TINA
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Section 9, part 1

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